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Like its fancier neighbors, La Bonne Soupe was created by a French expat: Jean-Paul Picot, a Breton native who arrived in 1969 as part of that wave of chefs who saw opportunity blossoming in New York. Early on, Picot worked at La Crepe, which was 48 West 55th’s occupant at the time, and which featured 100 variations on its namesake dish, along with — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — onion soup and a green salad. The space would evolve to briefly become La Quiche (La Fondue was across the street), before Picot and his wife Monique took it over.
“La Bonne Soupe” was not, in fact, a reference to the intended menu. The Picots borrowed it from the title of a 1958 Félicien Marceau play, and subsequent movie, about a middle-aged woman who spills the details of her various dalliances to a casino croupier. Regardless, it was soup — specifically a fortifying onion soup with a thick gratin — that quickly found the restaurant an audience.
The appeal was obvious: You could get soup, bread, a glass of wine or coffee and dessert for just $3.25. And the Picots made one other savvy decision in the mid-’70s — to buy the building that housed La Bonne Soupe. This would prove to be a less obvious but key element to its longtime success, as New York would become a brutal landscape for restaurant leases. And the simplicity of this success should have been no surprise to dedicated students of Parisian eating — in that it hewed close in spirit to a Parisian bouillon, versus a more elaborate bistro. Not diverging far from this formula would indeed become the key to its enduring popularity. As The Times put it: “New York could use Bonne Soupe just around every corner.”
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My own history with La Bonne Soupe began a full 30 years ago; there are few restaurants I’ve been going to nearly so long. Its appeal in the early 1990s was no different than it had been 20 years earlier — and no different than now. In my case, I could escape my uptown neighborhood for a few hours to indulge in a bit of Midtown adventure. La Côte Basque and Le Cirque were well out of my orbit, but a bowl of onion soup, a salad, and a glass of red wine for under $20 was a pretty rarified night out for a college student. (It didn’t hurt that our names were homographs.) Today, I realize I must have known about La Bonne Soupe even earlier: Among the businesses run by the Picots was J.P.’s French Bakery, one of the first spots in New York that offered quality baguettes and croissants. My father sourced bread for his food business from J.P.’s in the early 1980s, and I often would ride down to the city with him early on weekend mornings to retrieve fresh baguettes. Something must have imprinted.
Dining and Cooking